My friend Stu returned from California with a nice haul of “West Coast” beers not available in S. Florida. His philosophy is that good beer is meant to be shared, so he invited a small handful of friends to his backyard for a great beer tasting on Saturday.

The Beer "Waiting Room"

Above is what I called the Beer “Waiting Room”. This is a photo before more beer was added as guests arrived.

I have listed the beers in the Order we drank them. Our method of picking our next beer was very random. We would just go to the beer “Waiting Room” stick in our hand and pull out a beer, most of the time not knowing what we were going to pull out. It actually worked out quite well this way, as you will see the styles did vary and kept palate fatigue at bay. We were able to taste 21 different beers style from the 26 beers we had.

Note: This beer had a nice piney and citrusy nose. The taste was like the nose, you get a mild piney and a sweet citrus taste up front, which then lead to a refreshing and yet mild grapefruit rind taste. At 5.2% abv this would make a great session beer as it is extremely drinkable.

I picked this beer up in Italy a few weeks ago while I was in Greve in Chianti, Tuscany Italy. I happened to run into a great craft beer bar, La Birrateca di Greve. This place has an awesome beer list, they had at least 65 different high end Belgian’s (sitting in a cooler near the entrance), 35 American’s including Port Brewing, Great Divide, Hoppin’ Frog, Founders, yes even Breakfast Stout and about 65 others including the BrewDog and Mikkeller line-up. Mikela, the barmaid and part owner of this establishment was very knowledgeable about her beers and craft beers in general. She did a great job of describing the 2 dozen or so local Italian made brews to me. When I asked her what her favorite beer was, she picked this beer, A.F.O. She said she was a hophead and this was one of the hoppiest Italian made beers she’s had. I then asked her if it was as hoppy as some of the Californian beers she’s had. She said “no no, not that hoppy, but for Italy, it is very hoppy”. Since I trusted her judgment, I’m glad I did, I picked up this beers and a few other, which I will get to in a future post.

Ruth & Mikela in La Birroteca Greve in Chianti

On the Label: Consume by Dec 30, 2010. Rest of label is in Italian so here is the label for you to translate yourself. 🙂 (sorry, even though I’m Italian, I don’t know much of the language)

With the help of Goggle Translator : High fermentation beer a free interpretation of Pale Ale. Intense color of copper, is characterized by generous hopping that involves the use of more than ten hops from different backgrounds (including American Chinook, Cascade and Simcoe giving it smells of citrus and tropical fruit) and a caramel character with delicate toasting that admirably balances the bitterness.

A beer that I have always longed for: dedicated to the Ales obsessed like me.

The AFO was the second beer that we produced, VIÆMILIA output at the same time, when we got the license for the sale in late March 2007. I remember that time we had a party in the center of Parma in the small bar of our great friend Flavio, we serve the AFO pump and had an extraordinary success: there was even a Welsh told me very proud to have drunk 14 pints! The history of beer dates back to January 2006 when for the first time I came in contact with the character so new (to me) irresistible and American hops, but I realized early on that Pale Ale in my dreams I wanted to express something that went well beyond this, since the creation of a bouquet, complex, fascinating and never has been my usual challenge. Therefore traveling between England and Germany, visiting growers and hop varieties also experiencing very far (New Zealand) have carried out a search in the olfactory area of hops that perhaps is not quite finished (without prejudice to the unique character of the AFO that will always remain so).